Myth and Masculinity in Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the 'Tragic Hero'.

This study argues that in Japanese popular cinema the 'tragic hero' narrative is an archetypal plot-structure upon which male genres, such as the war-retro and yakuza films, are based. I address two central questions in relation to these post-war Japanese film genres and historical consciousness: What is the relationship between history, myth and memory? And, how are individual subjectivities defined in relation to the past? Chapters two and three examine the role of the 'tragic hero' narrative as a figurative structure through which the Japanese people could interpret the events of World War II and defeat, offering spectators an avenue of exculpation from a foreign- imposed sense of guilt. This narrative became part of a wider discourse which developed as a backlash against the criminalization of Japan through the conviction of her wartime leaders. In these chapters I analyse the ideological construction of the filmic 'tragic heroes' and their relationship to the popular interpretation of historical events. War-retro films are examined from the contextual perspective of the structuring opposition of a nativist Confucian ethic, and culture as defined in terms of western 'civilization' and encoded in the War Crimes Charter. Chapter one has traced the roots of this opposition to the formation of a nationalist consciousness through the invention of the kokutai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to counter western imperialism. I argue in chapter four that the fantasy world of the nagare-mono (drifter) or yakuza film is also based on this underlying consciousness of opposition. However, in the case of the nagare-mono, the archetypal outsider, this opposition is found between the yakuza moral code, jingi, and the restraints to spontaneous male freedom imposed by modem culture and the law - the law in this instance being both the police and courts and the more subtle constraints imposed by social institutions such as the family. In this chapter I therefore conclude that one of the reasons for the great popularity of these films in the 1960s and 1970s lay in their ability to offer men meanings that could help them understand the contradictions between the reality of their everyday experiences and the ideological construction of masculinity. Thus while the earlier chapters were concerned with an ideological deconstruction of the 'tragic hero', the fourth chapter analyses masculine subjectivity as defined by the 'tragic hero' of the nagare-mono fantasy from a psychoanalytic perspective

Rogue diva flows: Aoi Sola's reception in the Chinese media and mobile celebrity

Theorizations of celebrity often contend with questions of the constructed nature of star persona. This is more so the case when discussing divas in Japan, as they are subject to a wide range of gender regimes that mould the ways in which their persona is produced and consumed. Contemporary forms of transnationalism in East Asia, however, have created media flows and fan bases that provide new opportunities for Japanese female celebrities to re-construct their star personas, transcending their celebrity status in Japan. Focusing on the case of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video actress turned celebrity, this article demonstrates how transnational East Asian flows problematize our static theorization of celebrity. Sola's interactions with her Chinese social media fan base have afforded her a cosmopolitan persona that has been celebrated as a cultural bridge between China and Japan. At the same time, her star persona leaves her vulnerable to re-inscriptions into transnational politics as played out in everyday media flows. This dynamic is best demonstrated in Sola's attempts to quell anti-Japanese sentiment in China as well as in her efforts to reinscribe her star persona using nostalgic associations of cultural similarity and a shared past. Based on analyses of Sola's celebrity trajectory from adult video to online Chinese mediascape Diva, this article suggests that contemporary star persona status is better understood in terms of gender, movement and ‘meshworks’

Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s

Out of the background of war, occupation and the legacies of Japan's post-defeat politics there emerged a dissentient group of avant-garde filmmakers who created a counter-cinema that addressed a newly constituted, politically conscious audience. While there was no formal manifesto for this movement, various key filmmakers (Oshima Nagisa, Imamura Shohei, Yoshida Yoshishige, Hani Susumu, Wakamatsu Kiji, Okamoto Kihachi) experimented with very different conceptions of visual-style. It is possible to identify a sensibility that motivated many of these filmmakers

A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film

In A New History of Japanese Cinema Isolde Standish focuses on the historical development of Japanese film. She details an industry and an art form shaped by the competing and merging forces of traditional culture and of economic and technological innovation. Adopting a thematic, exploratory approach, Standish links the concept of Japanese cinema as a system of communication with some of the central discourses of the twentieth century: modernism, nationalism, humanism, resistance, and gender. After an introduction outlining the earliest years of cinema in Japan, Standish demonstrates cinema’s symbolic position in Japanese society in the 1930s – as both a metaphor and a motor of modernity. Moving into the late thirties and early forties, Standish analyses cinema’s relationship with the state-focusing in particular on the war and occupation periods. The book’s coverage of the post-occupation period looks at “romance” films in particular. Avant-garde directors came to the fore during the 1960s and early seventies, and their work is discussed in depth. The book concludes with an investigation of genre and gender in mainstream films of recent years. In grappling with Japanese film history and criticism, most western commentators have concentrated on offering interpretations of what have come to be considered “classic” films. A New History of Japanese Cinema takes a genuinely innovative approach to the subject, and should prove an essential resource for many years to come